The week that Britain's culture wars broke out

Besieged by protests and forced to discipline two of its biggest stars, the BBC got caught in a bitter battle over cultural values. As critics and supporters argue over its role, the corporation's attempts to create cross-generational entertainment have opened up new faultlines. By Elizabeth Day

For anyone still struggling to understand the youth of today in the wake of the Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross debacle, help is at hand from an unlikely quarter. The BBC has thoughtfully carried out extensive research into young people and posted the results on its website.

Under the heading 'Who are they?', we are informed that Britain's 16- to 24-year-olds are 'hard to shock' and 'aren't old enough to remember Thatcherism, Live Aid, Space Invaders [or] computers without a mouse'. The research concludes: 'The Young [sic] do not often associate the BBC with things that are relevant to them.'

It is, with hindsight, a most prescient statement. It underlined the difficulty the BBC faces in engaging a younger generation. In a week that has seen the corporation rocked to its core by accusations of indecency and tastelessness, this, perhaps, is the root of the problem.

When Brand and his co-presenter Ross left lewd phone messages for the 78-year-old actor Andrew Sachs on his answering machine, was the BBC guilty of chasing ratings at the risk of alienating a loyal, older audience? Or are the 30,000 people who complained to the media regulator Ofcom simply out of touch with the sort of humour appreciated by a younger, more anarchic generation?

Is this evidence of a widening gulf - as the Oasis guitarist Noel Gallagher put it last week - between 'them and us'? Or is it part of a broader debate about public decency? For the media consultant Simon Wakeman, it is simply a question of meeting audience expectation. Those who tuned into Brand's Saturday evening show on 18 October, he says, knew what they were in for. 'That kind of humour probably is acceptable in that kind of context. If you think about the way the complaints evolved - only two listeners complained after the original broadcast [the other complaints came after the story was reported a week later in the Mail on Sunday] - then that would suggest the BBC had got its audience more or less right,' Wakeman says.

On Thursday 16 October, Brand and Ross, a guest co-presenter, had been due to pre-record an interview with Sachs, best known as Manuel, the hapless Spanish waiter in the Seventies sitcom Fawlty Towers. When Sachs did not answer the phone, the presenters left a series of messages referring to Brand's sexual relationship with the actor's granddaughter.

In the increasingly explicit recordings, Brand and Ross speculated that Sachs might kill himself. The accompanying podcast featured an exchange where Ross suggested that Brand should masturbate Sachs into apologising. Two days later, the recording was aired. Brand has since resigned from the BBC while Ross, who is on a three-year £18m contract, has been suspended from his regular slots for 12 weeks without pay.

Wakeman says: 'The BBC has been forced to start looking for new audiences to ensure its future survival. They have invested in repositioning themselves over recent years from being fuddy-duddy to something more cutting-edge. This was part of that.'

Writing in yesterday's Times, Greg Dyke, the former director general of the BBC, admitted that the generational divide was key: 'Virtually all the young people I talked to - and by young I mean under 35 - thought that Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand were funny and that the whole incident had been blown out of all proportion. The older people I met didn't feel the same way. If the BBC ignores the next generation it does so at its long-term peril.'

The great challenge for the corporation has been attracting a new generation of licence fee payers while retaining its broad appeal. It has launched 11 digital-only radio stations and television channels in a bid to capitalise on the ever-expanding media market. It has recruited younger, edgier presenters, with a capacity to push boundaries while looking good in skinny jeans. It has sought, in essence, to become less Auntie, more trendy cousin.

'They are aiming to get into the youth market,' says Dan Hudson, station manager of Leeds University Radio. 'But it's a bunch of middle-aged people in charge, doing things they think are edgy and cool when it's not actually edgy at all.'

Radio 2, a station traditionally associated with cardigans, bifocals and easy listening, had gently rebranded itself in the Nineties. Lesley Douglas, the station's highly respected controller who resigned last Thursday, hired Chris Evans, the controversial breakfast DJ sacked from Radio 1 in 1997. She also put Ross, the BBC's highest-paid presenter, and Brand, one of the most innovative stand-up comedians of his generation, on air. It seemed, at first, to be a successful gamble. Brand's Radio 2 show, which aired from November 2006, attracted more than two million listeners and earned him £200,000 a year. The comedian continues to have a loyal following among the key youth audience, many of whom found the exchanges on Sachs's answering machine genuinely amusing.

In the wake of the scandal, Mark Williams, a 20-year-old politics student at Salford University, set up a group in support of the presenters on the Facebook social networking site. 'Support Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross, it was actually quite funny' now has more than 400 members. 'I really did find it funny,' admits Williams. 'It was a bit offensive, but it was done as a sort of kiddies' joke. It wasn't really serious - they were putting funny voices on. Everyone I spoke to of my age group found it funny. Most of the members of the public who complained would never have heard the programme: it was aimed at 18- to 30-year-olds.'

For Williams, modern comedy relies on 'edgy things being said, because people my age nowadays are a lot less easily shocked'. He attributes the escalation of the row to the right-wing media, pushing their own agenda against what they perceive as the liberal excesses of the BBC: 'It's been blown massively out of proportion. No comedian has ever got anywhere without pushing the boundaries.'

It is an opinion echoed by Radio 1 listeners who responded on the station's website last week with comments that were six-to-one in favour of the presenters. 'What a complete fuss over nothing much,' wrote Liz from Dorset. 'Russell and Jonathan are both known to be maverick characters who say pretty much what they think. Surely the BBC needs articulate, funny presenters?'

The editor of Radio 1's Newsbeat programme, Rod McKenzie, wrote on his blog that some of the anger generated was 'synthetic... it comes from the BBC's usual critics'. But even if the bulk of the public complaints came from those who had not tuned into the original broadcast, they raised a real question: when does humour cross the line into cruelty or bullying?

Richard Wiseman, professor of the public understanding of psychology at Hertfordshire University, whose latest book, Quirkology, explores the science of laughter, says that the problem with defending Brand and Ross is that 'what they said fundamentally wasn't funny'.

'I'm a fan of Russell Brand, but part of the problem is that, in this case, the victim was a well-liked elderly guy. It's one thing to laugh at taboos, and I'm all for dark humour, but it has to be done in an abstract sense rather than being directed at a particular person. Humour always pushes back boundaries, but it has to make you laugh.' Yet Wiseman was surprised when, at a lecture he was delivering to a group of 50 undergraduates who had heard the broadcast, 30 per cent of them said they had found it funny.

Over recent years, there is a perception that humour has veered increasingly away from the slapstick and self-deprecation typified in Fawlty Towers towards the more challenging brand of expletive-laced mockery represented by Little Britain. Although the debate has been portrayed as an ideological chasm between the casual liberality of the left and the so-called 'common British decency' advocated by the right, maybe there are elements of both sides who now feel enough is enough.

Perhaps, as JJ Norton from London commented on the BBC website, the Brand-Ross outcry provided 'an opportunity for people to make known what they have felt for a long while ... A lot of TV culture tends strongly to vulgarity and stupidity so people think: "What's my single voice going to do to stop this?" This issue has brought what was a simmering problem to a head.'

Quite what stringent editorial measures the BBC will introduce in the aftermath of Manuel-gate remains to be seen. Different generations will always find different things funny, but a publicly funded broadcaster arguably needs to remember that what might be hilarious to a 20-year-old in Manchester could equally be highly offensive to a pensioner in Torquay.

Thirty thousand complaints later, the simmering problem of how the BBC seeks to attract 'The Young' has been brought inescapably to the boil.